


Strange Neighbors

by Maneuver7



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Fluff, Gen, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-17
Updated: 2018-08-17
Packaged: 2019-06-28 14:54:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15709491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maneuver7/pseuds/Maneuver7
Summary: Artemis and Wally live in the upstairs apartment of their Palo Alto home. Their downstairs neighbor thinks they're a little strange.





	Strange Neighbors

     The strangest neighbors moved into the apartment upstairs.

     Of course, college students were never the most, shall we say, stable of neighbors, but there was still a limit to acceptable strangeness. Madeline’s first impression of “cute, young Stanford couple—a tad nerdy, but perfectly pleasant” had lasted all of ten minutes before she saw the girl unloading quivers upon quivers of arrows.

     “She’s really into archery.” Her boyfriend had offered as explanation when he caught Madeline staring.

     Well, Madeline had been quite the waterpoloist herself back in the day, so she supposed everyone had their sport. But then the girl started bringing in swords and crossbows, and really, was that not a tad excessive? What could she be doing with those anyway?

     Madeline’s suspicions dropped somewhat when the girl mentioned being from Gotham. A city like that warranted a crossbow or two, she supposed, but it was not just the girl. The boy was odd, too. One moment, his car was brimming with boxes, yet in the time it took Madeline to go inside, check on her zucchini bread, and peep out the kitchen window, he was carrying the last box up the stairs!

     After the couple’s initial move in, things settled back into normalcy. Until two weeks later, when Madeline, having adopted a very early schedule in her old age, noticed that nearly every morning the boy went out for a jog, but not five minutes later he was back, sweating and slugging up the stairs like he had just run a marathon! Madeline could not understand what kind of act he was pulling. He looked perfectly fit—she had seen him dash all over on their move-in day—so why would a simple jog around the block tire him out?

     Then there were the groceries. While watering her garden, Madeline often saw them pull up in their station wagon and unload bags upon bags of groceries. She thought maybe they were couponers or compulsive buyers or something similar until she happened to spot them at the local market when she passed by the frozen section on her way to pick up a prescription. They were bickering in the way they often did with a veritable mountain of groceries weighing down their cart. From her angle (and despite her deteriorating eyesight) Madeline spotted no less than three heads of lettuce, two gallons of milk, a dozen packages of lunchmeat, ten boxes of poptarts, six loaves of bread, and was that a five-pound bag of chicken whizees? Not that such purchases seemed entirely out of character for university students (she remembered when her son ate nothing but ramen and off-brand fruitloops in his college days), and indeed it seemed in line with her extreme couponers theory, but the bit of their argument Madeline overheard left her flabbergasted.

     “Come on, Artemis!"

     “Our oven is only so big, Wally! What, are you gonna pile all the pizzas on top of each other and shove ‘em in? You know that’s not how deepdish works right?”

     “We can cook them a couple at a time.”

     “You mean _you_ can. I’m not spending the,” The girl paused for a second to do the math in her head, “over two hours it would take to cook all ten of these pizzas!”

     Ten pizzas. Had Madeline heard that right? They must be throwing a party. That was the only logical conclusion. But, Madeline stayed up practically all night, telephone at the ready, and did not hear so much as a peep from her new neighbors. She saw them checking out with the pizzas. But no company came, no terribly loud music dangerously vibrated her fine china cabinet, and no telltale scent of a certain recreational herb wafted into her living room. The next morning she saw the boy trying to fit all ten empty pizza boxes in the recycling bin.

     When they did have company over, it was a parade of strange people. Often, she saw a young man who looked like a vampire with his dark sunglasses always covering his eyes. Then there were the weekly visits from the ginger-haired young woman whose features seemed just a touch different every time Madeline saw her. There was a very young man who always wore the exact same Superman shirt. He had seemed the most normal until he brought over his dog—a towering creature that nearly gave Madeline a heart attack when she first saw it. On occasion, she would see a man—tall, dark, and handsome—with bleach-blonde hair who, despite the summer heat, always covered up from head to toe. And there were a couple visits from an elegant black-haired girl who Madeline later saw on Ellen promoting the domestic tour of her magic act. At least the magician girl’s fiancée, aside from her odd choice in belts, was a perfectly respectable young woman who eagerly showed Madeline pictures of her young son.

     Her neighbor’s sister however was the strangest yet. Madeline first met her while coming home from a bridge game that had gone long. She found the woman shimmying out of the second story window. Taking her for a robber, as anyone would, Madeline rushed for her cellphone to call the police, but stopped when the Artemis girl popped her head out of the window.

     “Jade! Just use the front door you dramatic piece of s–”

     “Shh!” The woman, Jade, hissed urgently, “Watch your language in front of my daughter.”

     “Right, right. You know I can’t babysit like this all the time.”

     “Yeah, yeah fancy college girl, I know, but I have business to take care of.” The way she said business sent a chill down Madeline’s spine. “I’ll pick her up tomorrow ok?”

     “Goodnight, Jade.”

     “Night, sis.” The woman dropped down from the side of the house. She straightened up and turned to look Madeline in the eyes. She tipped down the bill of her hat, seemingly wanting to further hide her face.

     “Ma’am.” She greeted tersely before dashing away, leaving Madeline standing frozen in shock.

     Madeline put a security bar on each of her windows the next day.

     The couple adopted a dog. Madeline was hesitant around it at first—pit bull terriers were not her favorite dog breed—but she had to admit he was the most normal thing about her neighbors. And when the couple asked very politely for her to watch him while they were gone for a weekend, Madeline found she grew quite fond of the drooling, sleepy sweetheart. Though, really, what kind of name was “Brucely”?

     Over the next couple years, Madeline found herself taking care of Brucely more and more often. How two university students could afford to travel so often and for so long was beyond her. She went months without seeing Artemis, and then Artemis came back only for Wally to leave. And each time they moped around like the other had died or something. Madeline remembered the histrionics of youthful romance from experience, but she was much too old now to endure the melodrama.

     When the couple finally reunited, they became utterly inseparable—Madeline saw a lot more of Brucely then. She shuddered to imagine the honeymoon phase when they first got together. She even pitied their odd gaggle of friends who undoubtedly suffered through thousands of cutesy nicknames and nose kisses.

     When she actually talked to her neighbors, Madeline found she quite liked them. Artemis had been studying material science, but now she was thinking of switching to psychology. Wallace, meanwhile, was studying chemistry. The two of them liked dogs, hockey, and cooking together, among other things like sci-fi books and other geeky things Madeline didn’t quite understand—she’d always been more into fantasy, Tolkien and the like.

     Madeline also found out they were very far from family, Wallace having been raised in Nebraska and Artemis in Gotham. (When she’d asked, they’d said they met over the internet. Not her way of doing things, but she supposed these were new times.) Still, the internet wasn’t a perfect replacement, so she decided one holiday that she wanted to give them a little feeling of family that they must’ve been missing. So she baked some of her famous zucchini bread and walked it upstairs to give to them.

     When Wallace answered the door, he seemed caught like a deer in headlights when he realized it was her. She might’ve been insulted by this, but then she looked past him, into a room with the pretty magician and her wife and their son, the boy with the Superman shirt and his gigantic dog, the vampire man, the handsome man next to a tall ginger man holding Artemis’s niece, and a plain-looking man with stiff body posture next to a muscular blonde woman who wasn’t Artemis because Artemis was rushing up behind Wallace with a strained expression. As Artemis closed the distance, Madeline’s view of two green people became obscured.

     Green.

     A woman and a teenaged boy both with bright green skin. Her eyesight might’ve been going, but it wasn’t so far gone that she was hallucinating things. And certainly, not such ridiculous things. She pushed past Wallace and Artemis, wanting to get to the bottom of this strange get together of strange people. She stomped up to the green people, specifically the young woman, her ginger hair looked awfully familiar. And, ah, yes, Madeline had seen those eyes before.

     Slowly, she turned to take in the other guests, everything finally clicking into place. Because now it finally made sense how two random college students were friends with famous magician and superheroine, Zatanna Zatara. And that wasn’t a Superman shirt, it was a Superboy shirt. The handsome, always very clothed, man had thin membranes between his fingers and twin tattoos on the backs of his hands. She’d definitely seen that that blonde woman running around in fishnets before. And thinking of running, oh gosh darn it all.

     Madeline smiled at her neighbors, at Kid Flash and Artemis (that wasn’t even subtle!) Whoever said hindsight is twenty-twenty was completely right, because now it seems all so obvious. She held out her gift of bread to them.

     “You should’ve told me you were having guests. I would’ve baked more zucchini bread.”

     Madeline had a quiet, normal life, and she liked it that way. Her upstairs neighbors were a little strange, but she didn’t speak a word about it, because they were also the kindest, most giving, bravest people anyone could meet.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Let me know what you thought in the comments or on my tumblr: https://maneuver-7.tumblr.com/
> 
> I'm typically not a big Spitfire person, but I couldn't get this plot bunny out of my head.


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